My goodness Sunday was fun. When my family and I drove home after the 9:30 service, I said to Mandi, “If I had to dream up a last Easter Sunday with Bloom, it would look something like that.” The love, the laughter, the hilarity, the hearty choruses of “Crown him with many crowns!”... it took my breath away.

With my time at Bloom nearly at an end, it also made me think about how far Bloom has come. Those first several months (years, actually) of Bloom’s life were, quite frankly, positively painful. I always expected that at some point I would turn a corner with my preaching, which would then magically gel with the worship, our “thing” would happen, and then word would begin to spread across Denver about the very awesome “thing” that was happening at Bloom. “Hey, have you heard about the thing that is happening at Bloom? Man, something’s really going on there! Let’s go check it out!”

To my great chagrin, our moment of “thingness” never really happened. We kind of just ambled along slowly for a very long time trying to figure out what we were doing. Our first Easter service drew 115 or so people. I remember thinking, “Breakthrough!”

We were back at 85 the next week.

And yet, here we are, seven Easters later, and we might have had 500-600 with us on Sunday. How or when all of that happened… like, if you pushed me and said to me, “So when did Bloom really begin to turn a corner?”, I would be hard pressed to point to a moment in time. Mostly, I think it was a lot of tedium. Coffees and lunches and happy hours and meetings that made my heart sing and meetings that made me want to light my hair on fire…

And God used all of it to make something beautifully substantial.

Resurrection life is like that. The Psalmist said that the righteous are like “trees planted by streams of water…” Want to undertake a peculiarly thrilling exercise? Head down to Wash Park on your lunch break and watch the trees grow. No, really. It will freaking blow your mind.

Except when it doesn’t. Which is all the time. And yet, sure as shoot, those trees are growing; with each passing of the season they stretch out ever more towards their Creator in joyful praise. Because given the right conditions, that’s what trees do.

I’m telling you. It’s like that. Resurrection life is like THAT.

So, with both Easter and a new chapter of your life as a community upon you, I want to encourage you: keep doing what you’ve always done. Stay rooted in resurrection, keep loving each other, keep embracing the happy tedium of it all… God’s glory is peculiarly rooted in all that ordinary stuff, the power of the age to came present uniquely in the mundane.